Experiences with teaching adaptive optimization to engineering graduate students

The paper discusses the first-hand experiences of the author in developing and teaching a graduate level engineering course in adaptive optimization methods inspired by nature. The paper discusses course content, textbooks and supplementary written material, software and computer projects, and grading and evaluation. This course has encouraged many students to pursue research in evolutionary computation, tabu search or simulated annealing, however it is continually being modified to reflect the many changes occurring in the field.